I took photos of a very expensive home. A subcontractor of the builder wants to use one of the pics on their site, for free, of course. Their contention was that they would provide a link to my site in the photo caption, increasing my SEO. I agreed to let them use a low-res, watermarked pic (a transparent logo at bottom right), and then they wanted to alter it, cropping out the watermark. At that point I declined. If they had offered to license the photograph for use on their site, that would be a different story, but that wasn't the case. Can someone please tell me how linking to my site on their page would increase my SEO? Am I missing something here? If it truly would have value then I might be willing to reconsider.

I am far from knowledgeable with SEO stuff, but having links to and from your site do help to some extent. It's pretty minor unless you're linked up on a major website with a lot of traffic. I'd imagine a subcontractors site is not exactly high traffic, though I could be wrong. So he, I believe, is technically correct, but the difference will not be noticeable. Someone else will chime in here with a better more solid answer.

I would NOT let them use it because they wanted to edit it. SEO-wise, unless their site is a big site (PR5+), it's not going to increase you ranking...especially since the two sites have nothing in common.

jpc, I think you need to look at this another way, advertising costs money and if you can provide a free pic with a link for only 1 client it may provide future revenue. I only do wildlife so it would not be of benifit for my type of work however my brother is a large contractor and he spends half his time looking at competitors sites to gain an edge in the bidding business and to check out their sites to improve his. This may be the case with this guys site and the people viewing[mostly competitors] [who would not even have an idea about how to find a photographer] would naturally go to the link provided. This may or may not provide future sales but if you add a gallerie to your site just for this possible outcome it may be worth a try. This is just my opinion but everyone has a site these days and contractors are looking for any edge they can get right now and who knows?????

jpc, I think you need to look at this another way, advertising costs money and if you can provide a free pic with a link for only 1 client it may provide future revenue. ...

That's what my watermark is for. That's the only reason I even considered a free low-res pic. No one reads the captions below the image. They look at the pic and click to the next one. My watermark is much more visible. If they were genuinely interested in seeing more of my work, it's easy enough to Google the watermark and they're there. If they don't want to take the 5 seconds to do that, then they weren't really interested anyway.

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Originally Posted by orljustin

Yeah, soon you'll be raking in lots of links for free pictures.

Also true. The contractor making the request could also be a potential customer and allowing them to hack up a free pic isn't really setting much of a precedent for future negotiations.